The Journal of Environmentally Compatible Air Transport System (JECATS) is a not-for-profit international scientific journal dedicated to aspects of the air transport system with a focus on the environmental implications. JECATS combines areas of aerospace engineering, fuels, environmental analysis, climate change, economics, aviation climate mitigation, circularity and policy analysis. It includes aviation transport-related aspects and environmental effects from local to global scales.

It can be difficult to know if a given aircraft made a contrail. Existing methods that can be applied to any aircraft either use numerical weather data or satellite observations. In this work we create a new method by combining weather data and observations together. By comparison to in-situ measurements we show that the new method is superior to previous methods.

Targeted contrail avoidance consists of rerouting aircraft to minimise the formation of warming contrails. However, current predictions of contrail climate impact are highly uncertain. In this study, we show that some reroutings that were predicted to be beneficial for the climate are in fact damaging it. We further demonstrate that the risk of unintentionally damaging the climate can and should be included in the decision-making of contrail avoidance.